


please god make me a stone

by alchemystique



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Because of Reasons, F/M, Gen, this is all pain and angst folks, tywin lannister is alive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-18
Updated: 2014-01-18
Packaged: 2018-01-09 03:41:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1140999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemystique/pseuds/alchemystique
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She is as feral as the direwolf at her side." - Gendry finds Arya, but she's not the little girl he once knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	please god make me a stone

**Author's Note:**

> This was an old prompt fill for an old comment!ficathon on lj.

**Prompt: Game of Thrones, Gendry/Arya**

dark!fic in which Arya comes home from Braavos and finds Gendry, he starts to realize she's a batshit crazy psycho, literally. (But he loves her anyway)

bonus if Gendry is constantly paranoid she'll leave him.

  
  


**_please god make me a stone_ **

****

****

She is as feral as the direwolf at her side.

  
When the Brotherhood had stumbled upon the pair, Gendry almost hadn't recognized her - her dark tanned skin; the long, dark, scraggly hair; the empty eyes - but there was something, something in her that was still little Arry.

Barely.

Her direwolf tries to tear out the neck of the first man who approaches her, and Arya doesn't move to stop her, watching with those dark little eyes of hers, her face blank as two other men drag him away from the growling wolf, but then she looks over at him, takes in his longish hair and his broad (broader now) shoulders and the way he's studying her. She doesn't move, but the direwolf slips through the men and sniffs at him. Gendry tenses, sure he's about to have an arm ripped off, but the wolf looks up at him, all sad lost eyes, and licks his hand, whining softly until he digs a hand into the fur above her ears. 

Arya looks down at the sword in her lap, and Gendry tries to remember why he'd ever thought he might see his little Acorn Lady ever again.

 

* * *

She nearly kills Sansa the first time they meet the Lady of the Vale. Sansa sees her as the Brotherhood are all dismounting their coursers, and her eyes quickly fill with tears.

She races toward her sister, but when Arya sees her Gendry notices the way her hand stills over the knife at her hip, and the snarling curve of Nymeria's mouth over her teeth. Gendry intercepts Sansa a hairsbreadth away from her sister, and takes the blade to the leather vest he's taken to wearing when armor is just too much. He has a welt for days, only compounded by the near beating he takes from a knight of the Vale for daring to touch the Lady Sansa.

Sansa comes to him the next day to apologize for Ser Harres, slipping through the yard on soft feet to his place backed up against the forge. 

"She's different. She never cared for me the way she did our other siblings, but she never..."

"She's been alone a very long time, milady." His hand stills over the blade he's been sharpening, the whet stone clenched tight in his fist.

"But you knew her. Before. Didn't you?" She's pretty, he thinks, in the most traditional of ways, straight backed and soft eyed, a perfect little lady, her bright hair braided intricately and her dress clean and soft looking

Gendry takes a long time to answer, eyes following the boys sparring in the yard with wooden swords. "We were friends. Saved my life a few times."

Sansa's eyes are cloudy when she looks at him, studies him, more like, and when her eyes finally drop back to the hands in her lap he gets the feeling something in him has been found wanting. "What happened to her?"

He shrugs, not knowing the slightest bit of what might have happened to her. She's spoken mostly in riddles the past fortnight, the only time he feels like he knows her is when she sighs into his neck as she sleeps beside him. "Her family was slaughtered, her friends deserted her..."

"Did you desert her?"

The clash of metal on metal distracts them, and when they glance up it is to find Arya fighting one of the Vale squires, beating him soundly even from the start, her eyes wild and her body tightly wound.

Gendry sighs. "Didn't used to think so."

"And now?"

Arya cackles in a voice completely unlike her own, her eyes distant and her face nearly unrecognizable, and Gendry sighs again. "She's been alone a _very_ long time."

* * *

  
They make camp near Riverrun, and Gendry watches Arya as she scrounges for berries and twists the neck off a rabbit that seems to appear out of thin air in front of them, but Gendry knows Arya must have been watching for a while.

She still hasn't spoken - when she wants something, it is usually the direwolf (Nymeria, he thinks he remembers her being called) who finds a way to get it for her. She's skinnier than she was at ten, though the muscle on her body hides it well - anyone who didn't know her before would never be able to tell the difference. But as she got taller she just got leaner, and the hard lines of her face make it hard for him to remember sometimes what she looked like as a little girl.

But her furious look as she'd left him for good is burned behind his eyelids - he sees her every night in his dreams.

She skins the rabbit with ease, offering Nymeria a raw leg before she uses her tiny little fire to roast the rest. When she offers him a portion of her catch, he takes it without question - they've been living off smoked meats for two months now and the rabbit almost melts in his mouth.

"Where've you been, Arya?" he asks, not for the first time, watching Nymeria eye them both. Arya continues to chew as if she hadn't heard him, eyes glinting in the firelight.

Next to them, a few of the younger boys are speaking in loud whispers about her, about the Starks, about the direwolf at her feet, repeating gossip oft heard whispered throughout the Brotherhood, and most of it half-truths or complete lies. Arya seems not to hear them, either, but Gendry can. Can hear them recall the death of Robb Stark, the disappearance of the younger boys, Bran and the other, and even the death of Lord Stark.

Gendry gets up from his own fire to silence the boys. His presence is made more terrifying by the direwolf who strides next to him, and when he snaps at them to shut it, Nymeria growls for good measure. The boys give terrified nods and spend the rest of the night silent as the grave.

When he drops down beside Arya again, she opens her mouth and speaks in the Common Tongue, though it's accented to be nearly unrecognizable. "Been nowhere. Everywhere. Been here," she says, and then turns back to the fire, silent.

When she curls up next to him for the first time again that night, Gendry wraps his arms around her and presses his face into her dirty hair.

* * *

_Dragons_. The word is almost as foreign to him as the senseless phrases Arya sometimes mumbles in her sleep, words that must have meaning, somewhere, but not to him. The whispers come from across Westeros, but they started in the North, and so they begin the journey to the old home of the Starks. The knights of the Vale, and whatever little force is left at Riverrun, and the Brotherhood, and Gendry, Arya and Nymeria, all of them on their way to destroy the Bastard Bolton and reclaim Winterfell as their own. And still they hear the whispers, stories of whole armies of wights wiped out at the gates of the Wall, scorched out of existence by fires so hot they say the Wall feels warmer than the South, and flowers bloom between the stones.

Arya sometimes becomes _Arya_ when the Dragon Queen is brought up, and one night as she sits close to him by the fire she entertains the knights with a wild story of meeting the Targaryen woman - of _saving_ her from some raper on the streets of Braavos and the Queen offering her a place among her Queensguard, except Arya calls them bloodriders. She weaves the tale with the ease of a child, exaggerating when necessary and simplifying when need be.

He asks her about the dragons one day, and Arya grows quiet and thoughtful. "They were smaller, when I saw them. Could barely sit a girl my size, let alone a Dothraki screamer. But it's been years since then."

"Why didn't you join them?" He is honestly curious. With vengeance still the closest thought in her mind, it must have sounded like the perfect opportunity, to crush the pretender kings and kill her enemies.

Her gaze becomes distant, and he's lost her to the past again. "Busy. The girl had things to do. Things to...things. Dirty ugly..."

"It's alright," he says, although its not.

"She killed people."

He knows. As if he hadn't seen her attack people like a rabid dog, or sneak up on enemies so unassuming only to drive a dagger into their back. "It's alright," he says, and her gaze shifts off, far away.

"Not alright," she finally tells him, hand fisting in Nymeria's fur. "Never be alright."

When she slips beneath his cloak that night she is shivering and babbling, and he doesn't sleep a wink, not sure whether to be more sad for her or frightened of her. He'll never leave, he knows, not until she kills him, but the chances of that happening seem very high.

He pulls her closer despite the warmth of the night, and closes his eyes against the first rays of sunlight drifting over the trees hours later when she wakes the camp with a scream.

* * *

  
Dragons occupy the keep at Winterfell.

When they first crest the hill in sight of the ancient Stark home, Sansa's cry is like a bolt to the heart, and he is sure the place is burning, too, but as they ride closer the flames continue to leap and die.

Arya grows excited, spurning her courser past the caravan, a streak of color as she races toward her old home.

It's been burnt before, Gendry sees when he nears, pacing next to Lady Sansa, and though he has never seen the place before, he thinks it looks a sad shell of what he had always imagined.

Much like the rest of what he's always known of the Starks. Lady Sansa is quiet and ladylike, but she is hard and sometimes cruel; Jon Snow, the honorable bastard who was Arya's best friend, who she spoke of with such passion, has broken his vows to the Night's Watch, abandoning the Wall to reclaim Winterfell and, if Gendry is reading the looks right, has taken to bedding the Dragon Queen; and Arya, the beautiful, wonderful little wolfling he'd once prayed would grow up more quickly, was a broken little wild thing that he didn't understand.

But then, he supposes, _war_ can do things like that.

* * *

  
She comes to his bed one night, and under her cloak she's wearing nothing but her smallclothes. He can see her whole body, all the nooks and crannies that have pressed against him in the dark nights. Her breasts would fit perfectly in his hands, and he could see the hardened, dark nipples pressing against the shift. She whispers words in a language he'll never know and he nearly takes her against the wall. But when he slides his mouth around the shell of her ear she trembles and she sighs his name, _Gendry_ , rolling off her tongue like a prayer, her voice is so young, so innocent, and the moment breaks apart in his hands, melts through his fingers as he tries to wrap her in his arms, and she breaks angrily from him, fighting off his advance, her foreign words vicious and cold. The cloak finds its way back around her shoulders and she slides away into the night.

He doesn't see her for more than a fortnight. Jon Snow comes to him on the fourth day, while he smashes his hammer hard against metal that yields to his every will. "My sister is missing," he says without preamble, watching the steel twirl and slide orange and grey against the anvil.

Gendry looks up, hammer going slack in his hand. He'd known he'd hurt her, known he'd offended her very being, but the woman who'd come back to him was as resilient as the girl who'd left him with a flurry of angry words, if a little less tethered to reality. "Missing, milord?"

They search for any sign of her for weeks, but both she and Nymeria seem to have melted away from the world. The Dragon Queen even sends a party out to search for her, but they find nothing. She is...gone.

Gendry spends every night for the entirety fighting off night terrors, each one worse than the last. Arya bleeding in the snow, Arya with a sword deep in her gut, Arya, his beautiful, fierce Arya, fading away into the wild beast she's become, disappearing entirely from the body he knows so well.

She returns in the dead of night, with the bastard Baratheon Edric Storm hard on her heels.

* * *

  
He approaches the Dragon Queen a month later, asks to join the next raiding party heading north beyond the wall. She looks at him with sad, knowing eyes, glancing across the room to where Storm and Arya are bent together, whispering quiet words that Gendry desperately wishes he could hear. She is...different, again. Hard. Harder than he's ever seen her. The dress she wears looks like something Sansa would wear, but for the fact that Arya's breasts are nearly bursting from the neckline, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by Storm. And she is, not smiling, really, because Gendry can recall her smile and it never looked so cold.

"Perhaps it would be better to stay here."

Gendry shakes his head, trying desperately to ignore the way the womans violet eyes seem to see into his very soul. "There's nothing left for me here."

Watching him carefully, she sighs, soft and low, and nods her head. "Report to Jhogo in the morning, Ser Waters," she says, at it's the first time in _ages_ that anyone has called him that. It feels almost as if that is his only purpose, now, his only use, and so when he spends the next morning learning from Jhogo the most effective ways to light a weapon on fire without ruining it, he can nearly forget that not half a year before his only mission in life had been to put together the broken pieces of Arya Stark.  


* * *

  
The night is cold, and beyond the Wall the winds blow hard and biting. The men around him are loud, but Gendry does not join their rowdy laughter, instead curling into his cloak and furs in a desperate attempt to warm himself. It's not just the night, he knows. It is this place, the enemy they fight, the thought of Arya warming another mans bed at home. He'd thought leaving would purge her from his mind, but his feral wolf girl had never been far from his mind even in the years he'd thought her dead.

As the men laugh over some bawdy rhyme one of the knights is reciting, he hears it. The howling shriek of a dragon. Before he knows what has happened, men are on their feet, and fires light up the night. They are surrounded on every side, wights with bright dead eyes moving around them, taking out those at the edges of camp quietly, before anyone has time to react.

In a moment the howling wind and the cries of men drown out all else, and when he dips his warhammer into the vat of wildfire and swings it through the flames nearby, he knows he will die here.

* * *

  
Arya Stark dreams sometimes. When she is quiet enough, still enough, she can remember the way Gendry Waters laugh could make her insides warm and squirmy, remember the way his eyes had followed her in her silly acorn dress. But more often than not, Arya is not Arya, not really. The Faceless Men had taken Arya out of the girl, had molded and melted her into A Girl, A Boy, A Thing. She is the girl, now, and the girl does not have time for warm hearts and soft smiles.

Not even Edric Storms. He'd followed her like a lost pup when she'd returned to Winterfell, but she could smell it on him - his lust for her, for her name, for the power Winterfell could offer him. He was nothing more than a piece of the puzzle she needed.

And when the girl molded and melded him into the weapon she needed, he would be useless for anything else.

* * *

  
Danaerys Targaryen returns with hundreds less men than she came with, and as the girl takes tally she feels something wrench in her chest at the hulking figure near the head of the charge, war hammer in hand. It makes no sense to the girl. This man is of no real use to her - he will not help her kill who needs killed, he will not be able to sharpen her already sharp edges. The blacksmith has never handled a weapon like her.

He is useless.

And yet.

When she finds him that night, nestled beneath piles of furs and fast asleep, she slips beneath the covers and presses against him, feels the way his body responds to her, feels the rasp of cloth against the space between her thighs.

His eyes open blearily, and he is half asleep when his lips meet hers in a desperate kiss. He is all over, hands brushing across her shoulders, fingers pressing into the skin of her breasts, lips rousing her nipples to hard peaks, palm pressing hard between her thighs until the heat in her explodes into blackness, but still he is there, hovering over her, inside her, pressing, crushing, blurring her world into the blue of his eyes and the heat of his words.

He calls her name a thousand times, Arya, Arya, aryaarya _aryaaryaryarya_ and breaks apart above her, trembling and crying, and the girl feels her grasp on the world start to slip and fall away once again.

Arya is _gone_ , but who is she, who is this girl in Arya's skin?

* * *

  
They fight for days, Arya yelling and kicking and screaming and scratching, and she never leaves his presence without the start of a new scar on his skin.

But. Behind the violence there is a girl whose eyes flash when he calls her milady, who throws out curses about bullheaded bastards, who Gendry _loves_. She will leave him - she leaves him daily behind dead eyes, only to emerge underneath the furs of Gendry's bed when her soft voice cries his name, and she bites into his shoulder hard enough to draw blood. One day soon she will leave him for good, for he knows he is not useful to her. But he loves her, and she is his broken little wolf girl.

And one day, far down the road from now, Gendry knows Arya will return.

* * *

  
The blade cuts deep into her skin, and the girl is no longer the girl, is Arya, Arya Stark of Winterfell. The Faceless Men always told her never to kill someone she knew, and as she watches the eyes of Tywin Lannister gleam above her, she spares a thought for the pack she's left to lead themselves for years.

She knows now she will never lead them again. Lannister twists the knife, hard, and Arya crashes to the floor of the solar. As the world fades out from under her, darkness creeping around her, she remembers the blue blue eyes of her stupid bull of a boy, and wishes he'd known better than to fall for a dead girl.


End file.
